


You've Earned Your Stars

by BrujaBanter



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: But Maybe Too Long To Be A Drabble IDK What The Formal Rules Are, Drabble, Hermione Just Deserves All The Love, I Don't Have A Strong Opinion On The Pairing, Love Letter to the Trans Community, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Really It's Just A Commentary, So Fucking Worthy, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Trans Hermione Granger, again kind of, bc fuck JK Rowling, it's a metaphor, kind of, you are worthy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24584902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrujaBanter/pseuds/BrujaBanter
Summary: Words, like stars, can mean very much indeed, even from many miles away. Hermione knows this.ORA love letter to the trans community, and a reminder that this particular universe has always belonged to the marginalized and oppressed, no matter what certain authors say.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 49





	You've Earned Your Stars

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written quickly, and with a great deal of equal parts love and anger, in response to JK Rowling's most recent transphobic tweets. 
> 
> Content Warning for very minor transphobia in the form of Nosy Adults Who Think Children Should Have Certain Length Hair. 
> 
> P.S. I KNOW the "mudblood" scar is an invention of the movies, okay? It's necessary for the metaphor. Just go with it.

The first time Hermione was called a “Mudblood” she didn’t think to be offended.

It’s funny the way words can be intended with cruelty and not elicit such, when the target in question hasn’t yet been convinced they deserve it.

Like once, when she was very young, her parents took her into town for dinner and a show. She wore grey trousers and a red Polo (because she’d been told she had to), but she’d convinced her parents to let her grow her hair longer than usual. They were sat at a little French restaurant, munching on fresh baguettes and cheese she thought tasted funny, when a very tall woman with a very tight blonde bun came over to their table. “Boys shouldn’t wear their hair so long,” the woman said to her parents in the kind of voice her parents sometimes used with her when they were tired and she’d made a mess of her room. “People will think he’s a girl.”

And then the woman walked away. Hermione was only six at the time, but she knew the look her parents exchanged was not a good one. Back at home in her bed, she sat up, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars her mom had fastened to the ceiling during a phase in which all Hermione wanted to talk about was space and planets and astronauts and the universe. She thought about how sad her parents had looked. She thought about how happy she’d felt, how much she secretly _wanted_ people to think she was a girl. She thought about the stars and the planets and the universe. She thought about what it meant to feel joy in things that others found sad.

That became a familiar feeling. When she got her Hogwarts letter, she remembered feeling like the stars on her ceiling had opened up, invited her into a world beyond space and time and physics and science, and all she wanted to do was put on a spacesuit (an Extravehicular Mobility Unit, to be exact) and enter that universe. Her parents smiled, but they cried, and she knew enough about joy and sadness by then to know the two weren’t always mutually exclusive. She felt the joy of possibilities while they felt the sadness of loss. She felt the sadness of leaving while they felt the joy of pride. Things are complicated that way. Together they walked hand in hand – the way they’d always done – through the magical wall between platforms nine and ten, with the knowledge that all feelings are okay so long as they are moving.

When Draco Malfoy called Hermione a “Mudblood” second year, she didn’t yet know what it meant. But she got the distinct impression it was a word meant to be not-moving, a word meant to freeze someone in a moment like a body-binding curse. But a body-binding curse on top of a mountain. In a snowstorm. With no blankets or water or food. While a hungry grizzly bear looks on, tucking a napkin neatly into its grizzly bear collar, eagerly awaiting its Muggle-born meal.

Thing is, she hadn’t grown up in the wizarding world, had she? She didn’t have a father who spat words from a carefully curated, centuries-old list of slurs for every human, creature, and combination he might come across. The blood that ran through her veins was just blood, just water and salt and proteins. It was just a biological substance, keeping infection from overtaking her body and clotting wounds when they appeared and circulating oxygen to all of her organs (her very favorite being her brain, which worked and thought and processed and planned and made her _her_ ). It _couldn’t_ contain mud, would flush out the mere presence of it with all the power of thousands of years of biological innovation. Her blood – precious and moving and red as Draco Malfoy’s – couldn’t move faster than walking speed, and yet it rushed through her fast enough to power the cleverest thoughts of anyone in her class and the legs she rested on her friends during cozy nights in the Gryffindor common room and the fists that collided with Malfoy’s smug mouth just a year later.

Things are complicated that way.

But then, the war. And Malfoy Manner. And Bellatrix. And that same word – ugly and cruel and completely meaningless, depending on who you ask – carved into her arm in a way that will never fully heal, not really, because even if the same blood that powered such clever thoughts clotted and worked and cleansed, the scar cut deeper than her skin.

It’s funny the way words can be intended with cruelty and elicit such, when the target in question has no power to stop the bleeding.

See, the word itself didn’t matter. Bellatrix could have written “crumb cake” or “dolphin” or “menstruate” and it would have all scarred the same, because the magic of its intention was the same. Old magic. Stagnant magic. Dark magic. Hateful magic, done in the name of “truth” and “reality” and even sometimes “love”. As Hermione lie prostrate on the cold marble flood, she didn’t know what a manic, cackling Bellatrix was carving into her. She could have guessed – she was no stranger to cruel words at that point, after all – but when she closed her eyes against the stinging, unbearable pain, she pictured the plastic stars on her bedroom ceiling, and in the haziness of it all (borne, indeed, from loss of blood), she imagined that maybe Bellatrix was leaving a constellation on her body.

The scar never healed – some words, no matter how they’re delivered, can’t be taken back – but Hermione did. It was enough, to have friendship and love and acceptance. To know she’d fought for something better, a world where blood was just blood and mud was just mud and little boys could be little girls regardless of what someone decided when they were born (genitals, after all, are like blood, just thousands of years of biological innovation, no more or less than what you decide they are).

Sometimes, when she’d lie with Ron in their bed at night, his long, lanky arms wrapped haphazardly around her, his fingers would brush up against the scar. Sometimes she’d feel a flash of the shame Malfoy tried to imbue in her that day on the Quidditch pitch in second year, and she’d subtly move Ron’s fingers to a less contested space. Sometimes she’d feel powerful and alive, formidable and vibrant, and she’d turn over and kiss Ron with all the electricity of every star combined. Either way, she’d relax into the warm, intoxicating reassurance that she was whole, and she was loved, despite broken skin and cruel words.

Things are complicated that way.

End

Title Note: Fic title comes from “Warrior Heart” by Shawnee, an incredible, trans, Two-Spirit musician. You can listen to the song [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMdQANUS4xo) and support her work [here](http://shawneemusic.com/?fbclid=IwAR27iTWrTH1-sZJ6bYVtm1E0dFaaOiLx-89poCFXiwks1D97nIyTKBcN0AI).


End file.
